Exactly. The world didn't come to a complete stop--the aque blastia, for example, were already connected to underground water sources; it was just a matter of making them more accessible, things like that. The only thing we really lost was the convenience.

It's not like we're starting completely over though, either. One of the ways the aer was brought under control was by converting it to mana, a more stable state that's also closer to matter. Just before I came here, I had successfully built a mechanism to run on mana and was working on improving and testing it. That's how I was still able to cast that spell earlier.

I'd say our biggest loss, actually, might be Aspio. It was a city where nearly all the world's current knowledge was held and studies conducted, and where the empire's scholars lived. It was destroyed in the whole mess, so all that information and people are gone. There are only a few dozen mages at most left right now.